We want to Launch Apple Pay in India, says SVP Eddy Cue

We are very heavily involved with them in music and Apple Music. There's a lot more that we want to do with music in India. Secondly, there is a lot we want to do with bringing Indian music to the rest of the world said Eddy Cue, SVP, Apple.TV Mahalingam | ET Bureau | October 16, 2017, 13:17 IST

Eddy Cue , Apple's senior vice president for internet software and services, oversees the American giant's content portfolio from iTunes stores, Apple Music, Apple Maps, and Apple Pay, among other things. Cue, who joined Apple in 1989 and reports to CEO Tim Cook, was on a whirlwind tour of India where he hosted a bunch of Bollywood stars and announced the setting up of two Mac Labs at AR Rahman's KM Music Conservatory.

In an interview with ET's TV MAHALINGAM , Cue spoke about what brought him to India and his plans on the content front.Excerpts

You met half of Bollywood a few days ago. What was the idea?

We are very heavily involved with them in music and Apple Music. There's a lot more that we want to do with music in India. Secondly, there is a lot we want to do with bringing Indian music to the rest of the world. We have been working with new artists and existing artists to do that. More importantly, we wanted to announce the work we are doing with AR (Rahman) on the KM Music Conservatory with kids. It was great to set up a couple of labs with all the Apple equipment and create scholarships.

Are you looking at other creative collaborations with Bollywood?

There's a talk of tie-up with Steven Spielberg to bring back `Amazing Stories'...

A couple of months ago, we had announced that we had hired Zack (Van Amburg) and Jamie (Erlicht) from Sony Television to head our video work in Los Angeles. We are just getting started with that. I am not going to talk about what we are doing there because it's still early. But certainly, Bollywood is as good at creating content as anybody else around the world.

Let's talk payments. Some of your competitors (Google, Samsung) have made an entry into that space.What are your plans?

We want to launch Apple Pay here but we don't care about the payment mechanism itself. If you think about it in US terms, we don't care if it's Mastercard, Visa or whatever bank you deal with. If you are in China, we don't care if it's WeChat pay or Alipay or credit card. It is great that all of these payment mechanisms are coming out in India because it empowers people to be able to pay. What Apple Pay does is make that process easy, integrated and safe.

What about Maps? What's happening on that front in India?

We are investing a tremendous amount. Maps is a critical app, especially with the things we do now, and the things we want to do in the future. So, we wanted to expand and build in that area in a huge way. Because it was something that was newer in a sense, we were able to pick and look at locations that we thought could help us do that. The advantage here is that you have a tremendous amount of talent in engineering skills which is hard to find anywhere in the world.

So, we thought this was a great opportunity. Maps is not a project that has an end date -it changes everyday.We were excited about coming here because we heard a lot about the talent pool here, and have built an organisation which has nearly 4,000 people working on Maps now.

One of the criticisms of Apple is that India has been much of an afterthought in the past. Be it the launch of latest phones, or payments. Is it a valid criticism?

I think it is a valid criticism in the sense that, were we thinking of India with all the features that we are providing. The answer is we didn't have all of them. So, it is valid from that sense.But that's why we are here. We are changing that in a huge way.

When you look at the products that we have, like students discounts, those are things that wouldn't have been in the past here, but now they are here on day one. When you look at Apple Music, the most aggressive price point is here in India. We have done that very uniquely in India. We expect and we are here for the long term to make sure that when we are building new products or enhancing existing products, we are thinking of India.

Sponsored Stories

Subscribe ETCIO Newsletter

Prasad Rai, Vice President, Applications, Oracle India speaks on how enterprise users can now migrate their ERP application to its cloud platform in a smarter, speedier and safer manner, and how it could be the last upgrade they will ever do.